Russian Garden Gazette

One World Day is a singular celebration in a singular place. For eighty years now, with a single break in the pandemic summer of 2020, the Cleveland Cultural Gardens have gathered the whole city into Rockefeller Park.

Over those decades the festival has changed beyond recognition. In the first postwar years, thousands came. Then came the years when the Gardens themselves fell into neglect — and the gatherings grew modest, almost private. Later One World Day began to grow again: celebrations of some five hundred people, hosted by one Garden after another — the Irish Garden one year, the Ukrainian the next, and so on.

And in the 2010s the full scale returned: streets closed, a great Parade of Flags, thousands of guests, and programs running in dozens of Gardens.

And now the eightieth One World Day has taken place. On a grand scale, and with enthusiasm.

“The classical concert in the Italian Garden” was the 7th Annual Stars of Summer Laureates’ Concert. Young laureates played and sang with a live orchestra on the cobbled terrace of the Italian Cultural Garden, under canopies, in a fine drizzle.

Happy first of September, that first, old-fashioned day of school! However one feels about it — it was part of our lives. And this year my well-known film The Teacher, with Irina Kupchenko in the title role, turned ten. The film has had a very fortunate life on screen. Many premieres, more than thirty prizes at every possible festival, screenings in almost every country in the world, then Channel One television, screenings and discussions with students at American universities — and last year a contract was signed for an Indian version of our film. We are waiting impatiently for the result; it is the second Russian film franchise India has acquired. The first was everyone’s beloved The Irony of Fate.

I remember my very first “First.” I did not sleep all night, so badly did I want to go to school, toward everything new and unknown and rapturously awaited. On my grandmother’s side I have many hereditary teachers, and in my family the profession of teacher was worshipped. Later, of course, it became clear that one teacher is not like another, and that school in itself is an ambiguous thing: some schools do irreparable harm (I had one of those), and others do undeniable good (I had one of those too).

But every First, without fail, I ran to school with a big bunch of gladioli and the joy of the reunion. The smell of the first of September cannot be confused with anything else, cannot be forgotten or spoiled by any bad memory. The bitter scent of asters, chrysanthemums and apples, the flush on your cheeks from the morning chill, the slight trembling at the assembly, white ribbons and knee socks — yes, all the way to the tenth grade, when you are almost grown up and have spent the whole night suffering in curlers, and the ribbons are still the same ones the first-graders wear: transparent gauze.

When I was writing the not-unknown Teacher, my reference was mostly stories from the life of that same “unsuccessful school” — and even so, I did not put the most frightening and shocking facts into the project, or the result would have been not an action film but the bleakest possible horror (Leviathan would have looked like a light melodrama). The story of every “troubled” pupil is very harsh, and I remember them all, every one of them; I still cannot forget it, although at the time I was a pupil in the lower grades myself, and one “from a good family” — which for me was more terrible still: to be an observer of the cruel and unjust fates of children who fought for their lives as best they could, sometimes by the most heartrending means. In Leningrad, in the “cultural capital” of the most “developed” country in the world, the USSR, family and social lawlessness was going on, and almost nobody actually cared. The only ones who cared were some of our teachers. I remember every one of them by name (there were not so very many who did not shrug it off). They sat for hours in the after-school program with failing pupils, trying to drag them into the next grade. They fed them, comforted them, encouraged them — these poor children, terrorized by alcoholic parents (the labor force of the Soviet system), worn out by sleepless nights and by the impossibility of feeling safe anywhere at all. At school they were endlessly harassed for failing; at home they were simply beaten and starved. Against the background of that hell, the non-stop psychological abuse in my own family seemed like a minor unpleasantness. Against the background of that hell, we tiny first-graders were taken around the district education offices in KGB caps, with little poems and carnations. None of us understood what was going on; we simply liked being on stage in white ribbons and lace pinafores, and we liked getting out of lessons. The endless systemic lying revealed itself later; by about the fifth grade all my illusions were already gone.

What has stayed with me is boundless love and gratitude toward some of our teachers, who taught us kindness, beauty, culture and personal discipline. They taught by their own example, because that is the only way anyone can teach anything at all. Demagoguery, lying, duplicity and moralizing can teach nothing except demagoguery, lying and duplicity. Many of the adults of my childhood, unfortunately, did not know this. And they were surprised by the results of their “upbringing.”

Now that we have become adults ourselves, we must remember constantly that only by personal example can anything positive be achieved with children. That is what the work of a real Teacher consists of.

Translated for the Gazette. The Russian edition prints the original.

Everyone who went to a Russian-language school knows the first four lines by heart. Fewer people know that the poem may not be by the poet whose name is on it.

But first, the schoolboy. A student friend of mine, Oksana Sh., was doing what was then called “mentoring” with pupils at a perfectly decent Moscow school near the university where we all studied. Among her charges was a boy with a funny surname — Kust, which means bush — and an excellent sense of humor. He liked to quote these mournful verses, always adding: “and at the words and the bare bushes look on, dejected, the whole class turned to look at me and howled.”

Now the detective story. For decades, in Soviet school readers and children’s anthologies, this quatrain was printed under the name of Alexei Pleshcheev. Modern scholars think he almost certainly never wrote it.

The main argument: the poem appears in none of Pleshcheev’s collections published in his lifetime. Its rhymes are very plain — flowers with bushes, yellows with greens — and unlike the more graceful children’s verse he actually did write.

The text first appeared in 1885, simply titled “Autumn,” in a primer called Nashe rodnoe, compiled by the teacher and school inspector Alexei Baranov (1844–1911). It was printed anonymously, as ordinary teaching material for first-graders learning the signs of autumn. Since Baranov often wrote such simple verses himself, researchers consider him the most likely author.

The confusion seems to have started with the composer I. S. Khodorovsky, who in 1902 set the words to music in a children’s songbook. He took the text from a schoolbook where no author was named and — by the sound of it — decided it felt like Pleshcheev, who was famous for a similar children’s poem. He signed it accordingly. Soviet publishers reprinted from that songbook, and a schoolteacher’s classroom exercise entered Russian literature under a classic’s name, in editions of millions.

George Danelia (1930–2019) made the kind of films people quote to each other for decades without meaning to: Walking the Streets of Moscow, Afonya, Mimino, Autumn Marathon, Kin-dza-dza! Comedies that turn sad halfway through, and sad films that keep being funny. He was born in Tbilisi on 25 August 1930.

Which brings us to a screen among the trees.

For several summers the Russian Cultural Garden held Open-Air Movie Nights. They were never our largest events. But for the people who came — folding chairs, a blanket, the Garden going dark around them — there was something a large hall cannot give you.

Danelia has no stone on the Walk of Fame. What do you think about placing one? If someone would like to sponsor it, write to us.

The hydrangeas, dazzling white not long ago, have noticeably rusted as the season closes. The sun now pierces the leaves much lower down, and goes out much earlier. Everything the Garden lived by this summer — the festival, the concert, the guests, the curious passers-by discovering names new and long familiar on the Walk of Fame — all of it will stay in memory, and that memory will soon be colored in the lavish shades of autumn.

But not yet. For now it is still summer, with the faintest traces of change. September is one of the Garden’s finest months. Walk its paths, and take pleasure in the last hot days of the summer going by.